Examine the nuts and bolts of successful management in today’s rapidly evolving libraries!This book is an essential primer for new library managers and directors. In addition to providing an overview of the practical aspects of management, it is a vital reference tool for managing your library and its staff. The Practical Library Manager’s informative text and comprehensive bibliographies of print and electronic resources can guide you to solutions to the issues that every fledgling librar...

Develop a library staff training program that really works!To stay on top of the lightning-fast changes in the library field and provide your patrons with the best service possible, you need to establish and sustain an effective program for training your staff. The Practical Library Trainer examines the concept of the library as a learning place for patrons and staff, offering a comprehensive view of training from an administrator’s perspective. Bruce E. Massis, author of The Pract...

The Challenges to Library Learning: Solutions for Librarians is an insightful volume that offers a practical philosophy of engagement that can be used to meet the growing challenges facing librarians, including staffing shortages, depleted or eliminated training budgets, longer hours, greater workloads, and rapidly-changing technology, hindering the ability—and willingness—of employees to continue job education in library sciences. With three decades of experience as a library adm...

As the global information economy grows, librarians who are able to retool and transfer their skills are finding themselves increasingly in demand. In Whats the Alternative? Rachel Singer Gordon explains the dynamics of the shifting market for information-based work, reveals a range of nontraditional employment opportunities for librarians, and encourages info pros to utilize their skills in new and exciting ways. Mixing practical advice with real-life stories of librarians working in vari...

The Data Quality Assessment Framework shows you how to measure and monitor data quality, ensuring quality over time. You'll start with general concepts of measurement and work your way through a detailed framework of more than three dozen measurement types related to five objective dimensions of quality: completeness, timeliness, consistency, validity, and integrity. Ongoing measurement, rather than one time activities will help your organization reach a new level of data quality. This pla...

"A lively, succinct, and readable introduction" to conducting academic research—from devising research questions to evaluating sources and more (Joseph Harris, Duke University).To do solid academic research, college students need to look beyond the computer search engine. This short, practical book introduces students to the important components of the information-seeking process. The Elements of Library Research provides a foundation for success in any res...

Conflict over information has become a central part of modern politics and culture. The sites of struggle are numerous, the actors beyond count. Currents of liberation and exploitation course through the debates about Edward Snowden and surveillance, Anonymous, search engines and social media.In Information Politics, Tim Jordan identifies all these issues in relation to a general understanding of the nature of an information politics that emerged with the rise of mass digital cultu...

Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex system...

Limited time offer.A local library, passport to a larger world for its individual patrons, is also a democratic institution whose contribution to the strength of a community is out of all proportion to its size or membership.Several thousand Carnegie libraries were built a century ago when Andrew Carnegie, who had risen from poverty to become "the richest man in the world" vowed to donate all his money before he died and set about giving millions of people ...

Social software lets libraries show a human face online, helping them communicate, educate, and interact with their communities. This nuts-and-bolts guide provides librarians with the information and skills necessary to implement the most popular and effective social software technologies: blogs, RSS, wikis, social networking software, screencasting, photo-sharing, podcasting, instant messaging, gaming, and more. Author Meredith Farkas presents numerous success stories and interviews to hi...

Designing Information Literacy Instruction: The Teaching Tripod Approach provides a working knowledge of how instructional design (ID) applies to information literacy instruction (ILI). Its "how to do it" approach is directed at instruction librarians in all library settings and deals with both face-to-face and online ID issues. No matter where an instruction librarian works, whom they are teaching, or what delivery mode they will be using, the ID process remains the same:Start wit...

Developing many of the major, exciting, pre- and post-millennium developments from the ground up, this book is an ideal entry point for graduate students into quantum information theory. Significant attention is given to quantum mechanics for quantum information theory, and careful studies of the important protocols of teleportation, superdense coding, and entanglement distribution are presented. In this new edition, readers can expect to find over 100 pages of new material, including deta...